The Emotional Poll Roller Coaster

RUSH: Here is Ned in Upstate New York. Ned, glad that you called. It’s great to have you on the program. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Am I coming in okay?

RUSH: Yeah. Coming in fine.

CALLER: Well, I was getting in the shower this morning and I dropped my phone in the toilet so I’m amazed that I got through and that you can hear me. So…

RUSH: You’re using the phone that you dropped in the toilet?

CALLER: (laughing) Yes, I am. I dried it off.

RUSH: What kind of phone is that?

CALLER: It’s a Droid, like a Droid X. I’m getting the new iPhone 5 in two days when my contract’s up.

RUSH: So you’re getting a 5, eh?

CALLER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RUSH: That’s another thing. The tech media is going bonkers over the iPhone 5. What have you heard about the iPhone 5?

CALLER: You know, it’s the next phone to get. You know, not much more than that.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: I’m not swayed by it; I just need a new phone. But, hey, Rush, I want to steer the conversation back to polls. There are four words we need to stop paying attention to, and that’s “Real Clear Politics Average.” Let me tell you why. I spent 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry, okay? You’d go into a doctor’s office and you would present a clinical trial to a physician, and that clinical trial — at the end of that study — what the doctor paid attention to was: Did that study conclude with a statistically significant result?

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: Even within that clinical trial, a smart doctor can go through and say, “Well, you know, you had a higher starting baseline here. This had too many patient populations that don’t reflect mine. This had too many old people, too many women.” So even within a statistically significant trial, okay, a physician could find fault with how you arrived at that statistically significant conclusion. And you were never allowed… Even if you took a body of data over the course of the lifetime of a drug and went in and said, “Here’s four clinical trials,” even if they themselves were all statistically clinically significant, you were never allowed to kind of put that in a basket and arrive at some, random aggregate number that showed your drug in a positive light. And subsequently, now —

RUSH: Is that because these polls are taken in different ways?

CALLER: Correct. Each poll, in and of itself, is utterly flawed, right? So each poll is flawed. You’ve got likely voters and you’ve got registered voters; you’ve got oversampling of Democrats; you’ve got undersampling of Republicans; you’ve got older people that are home by a phone. You got oversampling of younger people sometimes. It’s a completely, utterly flawed process.

RUSH: Let me tell you: I have an entire… Well, not an entire segment. With my talent, I could probably make it a whole segment. I got a couple things here about polls that I’m gonna get to in the monologue segment of the next hour (which, for those of you in Rio Linda, is the first one). It’s gonna pretty much confirm what you’re saying. I don’t pay attention to that. In fact, the Real Clear Politics Average is a Bible — he’s right — for junkies. Nothing against ’em, I just… Well, you’ll hear when I get to it. For example, Jim Messina, who is the Obama campaign manager. Get this. Jim Messina over the weekend said (summarized), “Forget these polls that show Obama and Romney tied. Forget those. We are winning. Forget ’em.”

Something’s happening out there. “Forget the polls that show this race tied. We are winning.”

Anyway, he’s got a point.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: As for the polling, you know me, I’m distrustful of them. I’ll tell you what I have to fight, and I’ll be very honest with you. When a poll is really, really out of whack with what I want to happen, I do have a tendency to disregard it. And I have to fight that, being very honest — especially, I don’t believe a poll that shows Obama up seven or eight with a plus 13 Democrat sample. So I just throw it out. Other polls I have had a tendency, if they don’t reflect what I sense is going on or what I hope is going on, I disregard them. And that’s not good. I have to fight that all the time. But even with all that, I still think these polls, right now, both pro and con, are more oriented toward pushing agendas than measuring voters. And I don’t know how accurate they are at measuring voters anymore. I hear these pollsters talk about they only make land line calls and fewer and fewer people are using land lines.

I look at the samples that these people are using, and sometimes it’s not even likely voters, it’s registered voters. And I think all it does is contribute to a roller coaster, emotional roller coaster that isn’t healthy. Emotional roller coasters tend to emphasize the lows, tend to be more affected by the low, by the dip in an emotional roller coaster than when you are at the peak. And I think that’s all part of the game to suppress our turnout and to suppress our vote. Romney’s job in this campaign is to turn out his base. That’s what Obama’s doing, and we know what his base is. Obama’s base, welfare recipients, the redistribution crowd, he has written off white working-class voters. He has written off so-called rich, but successful people. He’s going for a constituency the majority of which we would say are underachievers, and he’s using class warfare to do it, and that’s who he views his base is, and he’s doing everything he can to turn ’em out.

You know, when Romney said to his donors, this 47% of the people, I’m never gonna get ’em. Okay, so that means there’s 6% out there that’s left… Let me put it this way. Obama and the Democrats are not focused on the independents. Obama and the Democrats are not focused on the moderates. They’re focused on getting their base out, and they’re trying to expand that base by forming sympathetic, empathetic alliances with the downtrodden, and there are a lot of downtrodden because Obama has made them that way via his policies. More people on food stamps than ever before, thank you, Barack Obama. Is it a coincidence that in 1998, Barack Obama talks about a majority coalition of welfare recipients and in 2012 we got a record number of Americans on food stamps while he’s president? I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

So he’s trying to enlarge the underclass population. The Democrats need a permanent underclass, and they need it growing. That’s why they like illegal immigration. It’s why they like amnesty. They need an ever-growing and solid underclass, and that’s who Obama’s going for. That’s who he’s trying to turn out. Romney has got to turn out the conservative base. Now, some of you might say, “Well, Rush, the conservative base is gonna turn out because of Obama.” I think so, too. I don’t know how many conservatives — I mean, you talk to ’em. You are one of ’em — fit to be tied over what’s happening to this country, the direction it’s being taken.

Is there anything Romney could do to make you sit home? Snerdley, is there anything, is there any mistake Romney could make that make you sit home? Because it’s about stopping Obama and the Democrat Party. It’s about that. But I still think that it would be helpful if Romney were to focus on the base, the Tea Party conservative, get ideological, go out and firm ’em up. Get ’em doing more than voting. Get them working for you, posting yard signs, phone banks, getting people out to vote, early voter, whatever. I know, I’m joining the chorus of everybody offering advice. And I know. I don’t like anybody telling me how to run this show. I really get my back up when people who’ve never done it start telling me how to do it.

I’m sure politicians feel the same way. “Why should I listen to a bunch of people that have never run for office?” would be a reasonable thing for Romney to say. “I’ve run for office. I’ve been elected. It’s a business. I know more about what I’m doing than these armchair guys.” So in a sense I understand that. Do you realize early voting has already started? I saw something over the weekend about voter registration, early voting in Ohio being so vastly in Republican favor. The person telling me about it was shocked, it’s something that would never be reported. That’s, again, according to polling data and just the narratives each day in the media. When you hear early voting, don’t you automatically think that’s all Democrats turning out? You do, don’t you? Admit it. Because that’s the media intention, that is the narrative. It’s designed to depress you, dispirit you, suppress your vote. Early voting, you’re supposed to hear that and go, “Oh, my God, the Democrats, oh, they’re more fired up than I am.”

I don’t like this emotional roller coaster and I try not to get on it. But the early voting has started. Reporting on polls is, as the media does, it’s a waste of time. What the Republicans need to work on is not polling and not getting the results you want in polling. The Republicans need to work on registration and getting out their vote and their early voters and absentees. Grassroots stuff. The stuff that the Tea Party people, like at FreedomWorks are doing. They’re out there doing this stuff that you never hear about. There’s a lot of this grassroot effort on the Republican or conservative side happening you never hear about. The pictures that accompany early voting, you look at that, “Oh, that’s all Democrats,” and you’re supposed to get all depressed and down in the dumps.

Now, let’s see here. Ed Goeas and Brian Nienabor. This is the George Washington University Battleground poll. It’s reported on the Politico: “Republican Poll Analysis, Romney Winning with Middle-Class Families.” Huge. Fourteen points. It looks like Obama’s attempt to crush the middle class, force ’em onto food stamps, has not been lost on those most immediately affected by Obama’s war on prosperity. It seems that middle class Americans favor Romney over Obama by 14 points.

That is not insignificant at all: 14 points. In some polls of independents, Romney is up anywhere from 13 to 14 points. (interruption) What’s this? I made a mistake talking about The View? We had a drive-by caller who said, “No, there aren’t any babes, just one babe on The View. You goofed up.” Look, that’s for you to judge on your own, folks. There are four women there, or five. There were five women and Obama sandwiched there in the middle of ’em. They were all sitting. It’s okay.

So independents: Romney up 13 to 15 here. With the middle class, Romney is up 14. So how does it figure that Obama’s leading in some of these polls? What we’re to believe is that the underclass is much larger than the middle class now, and that is a concern because of Obama’s policies. There’s downward mobility in our economy now. There’s downward mobility. Middle-class people are trending downward, and Obama’s policies are causing it, and now he’s trying to coalesce them.

Gas prices have doubled since his immaculation.

Pain at the pump is felt every time you fill up your tank.

Home values have not recovered. Obamacare is now going to tax six million middle class Americans in ways that we weren’t told about during the whole debate, vote and all of that. That was news last week. Working Americans, middle-class people know that Obama’s run up the deficit, and that’s gonna result in Democrats calling for a value-added tax and a tax increase. It’s already being bandied about. Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal was on Fox this morning.

“Yeah, we’re gonna need more tax revenue. There’s no question about it.” So that’s settled in. What he’s saying is we need more tax revenue by having more workers, which is true. You broaden the base, you get more tax revenue being paid by more people having jobs, not raising rates on people. So Obama wants to raise rates on people. We’re back to redistribution. Again, the key to remember about that is: You can only do that one time.

You can only wipe people out one time, or you can only take 40% or 50% of what they earn one time, and they’re gonna stop working! So after your first massive redistribution scheme, you’re dead in the water; there isn’t gonna be any more to redistribute. Then you’re gonna have to start borrowing or printing even more. You go to these coal mine states. Democrats are becoming Republicans because of Obama.

Working Americans know that you start closing down coal mines like Obama is doing and wants to do more, and you can say, “Hello, rising electricity rates!”

Which Obama also wants, because he wants you using less of it because that will “save the planet.” Climate change and so forth. Here’s another one. This is from Freedom’s Lighthouse. They quote a guy named Jay Cost at the Weekly Standard, who put together a chart that shows an historical analysis. Every president below 50% in mid-September in the Gallup poll has lost the election. Every one! Every president below 50% in the Gallup poll in mid-September has lost.

Well, Obama’s at 47% or 46%, and it’s beyond mid-September, and we’re talking the Gallup poll. So what do you make of this? Well, this could go one of two ways. Either the trend will continue, or rules are made to be broken. Records are made to be broken, whatever. Could Obama be the first to disprove this? Who knows? This is why you go nuts analyzing this stuff when you really don’t know anything because none of these polls actually matter. The only thing they do is shape public opinion.

That’s all they can do. The polls don’t matter. They don’t count. There’s not one poll that matters. We’re not gonna determine who the president is based on any of these polls, aside from the attitude they create and what impact it might have on voter turnout. ABC News: “Young African-Americans Support Obama But Turnout Not a Guarantee.” Well, of course! Who knows what the turnout’s gonna be right now with anybody? Nobody knows. No matter what poll you’ve got.

No matter how many Americans you’ve asked, “Are you gonna vote on Election Day?” it doesn’t matter what they say. Something could happen later today or tomorrow to change their minds. Dick Morris has a story: “Why the Polls Understate the Romney Vote.” He thinks Romney’s up by seven or eight. He thinks Romney could win this thing by five to eight points. Jim Messina of the Obama campaign says, “Nah, forget these polls that show we’re tied. Those polls are wrong. We’re winning!”